Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

So, who else watched Conclave this week? I admit I did, despite it seeming a bit ghoulish, but I’ll chalk it up to the fact that I figured it would be top of mind among both the talking-heads and ordinary folks in the coming days, and I wanted to be able to follow “the discourse.” My thumbnail review of the film: eh… it was alright. Some have praised it as amazing as art and social commentary, others have slammed it as an anti-Catholic or even anti-Christian hit piece. I don’t thing either extreme is right. It was just okay.

I will say, and without getting into spoilers, I’m not sure if the main character had much of an arc; whether or not he developed. This question is apposite today, because he seemed to be defined from the beginning as inhabiting this uncomfortable ground between faith and doubt. This is a reality most of us experience at some point or another in life, and it’s not to be reckoned a fatal moral flaw. That said, I’m always a bit suspicious with art and literature which begins by positing the practical epistemic and theological value of doubt (which is real) but then doesn’t take it any further, which doesn’t seem to lead to any resolution other than maintaining doubt as a virtue in itself rather than the path to a greater faith. I’ve not read the novel on which the film is based, but I have read some articles and interviews which suggest that the book might imply that the Holy Spirit has a role in the way the plot unfolds, as opposed to its film adaptation, every point of which can be empirically justified, even when it’s sometime a stretch. Anyway, that’s my one rather big criticism of the film, though it’s entirely possible I’m not giving it enough credit and am simply falling victim to my own need for clarity and certainty in a knee-jerk fashion. So, as they say “YMMV” (your mileage may vary).

I bring all this up because this week we get our annual reminder of poor “Doubting Thomas.” In previous sermons on this text I said that we miss the point of the story if we turn Thomas into a charicature – the icon of incredulity – whether we lambaste his doubting ways or affirm them as the saint par excellence of modernity and scientism. His life as a whole and his response to this Risen Lord in particular is more rich and nuanced than that straw Thomas. Unlike the protagonist of that movie, Thomas has a character arc, in which his doubt is transformed into greater faith.

So I want to focus not on the doubt itself, but what grew out of it- a stronger belief and a commitment to living out that belief as an apostle after the Resurrection. The more I consider doubt as a part of the believer’s life, the less ready I am to to say anything definitive about it. Some would reckon doubt of any sort a serious moral failing. Unequivocally denouncing all who would question their beliefs can lead to a shallow sort of faith or, even worse, to the kind of unquestioning obedience to a set of beliefs and actions which strikes me as an element of cults rather than true religion.

On the other hand, there are those who would elevate doubt itself to a kind of article of faith, as ironic as that may sound. Such an approach might hold that one must question everything to come to any kind of certainty about anything. Now, I love wrestling with hard questions, and I think new insights often depend on our being open to admitting we were mistaken about something. That said, if doubt is the primary mode of religious imagination, it seems to me we’ll never be able to find our footing. We’ll be captive, it seems, to infinite regress. What’s more, such an approach is helplessly individualistic, finding no recourse to the community of the faithful, the communion of saints of which we are a part, and, thus, more-than-a-little arrogant. No, it seems, if we’re to have any foundation at all, it must be upon convictions which have by some process and at least to some extent been inoculated against doubt. I happen to believe the deposit of faith is trustworthy because it developed by the direction of the Holy Spirit over the course of hundreds of years. Even if one doesn’t believe that, it seems to me manifestly obvious that I am not as smart as the Church Fathers, and edgelords on the internet sending tweets and making youtube videos are far less circumspect and careful in their analysis than those who wrestled with the finer points of the theology of, say, the Incarnation and the Resurrection within communities of faithful inquiry and Christian practice.

However, we shouldn’t view doubt and faith as moral antipodes, but rather as spiritual givens? Each, no doubt, abides alongside the other. Thus the father of the epileptic boy in Mark’s Gospel can without self-contradiction proclaim, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

The blessedness of those who have not seen and yet believe, then, does not make them morally superior to Thomas, but simply spiritually better off in the moment. It is what is done by the seed of faith, no matter how small, no matter the concomitant doubt and fear, by which we are judged. That mustard seed of faith was enough to raise Thomas from doubt and despair to a heroic life spent, even to the last, in service of the Gospel.

So must we acknowledge our misgivings, our uncertainties, our lack of perfect confidence and ask the God of all confidence to give us the strength to persevere in belief and in trust that he will not leave us comfortless. We’ll not be on the wrong path so long as we keep praying for that assurance, so long as we can honestly say, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Alleluia. Christ is Risen.

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There is an icon which sits on my desk, right where I see it every time I look up from my paperwork or computer screen. On the left is Mary Magdalene, taking the classical pose of a teacher (left palm up, right index finger pointing). On the right are the eleven remaining apostles, after Judas had left their number, all gesturing in a way that indicates that they are being taught. This might just be projection on my part, but to me the faces of the apostles all look a bit sheepish. And the Magdalene’s expression seems to me as if she’s thinking “now c’mon you dolts. I told you so!”

That icon was one of the few things already in my office when I arrived. I don’t know to whom it originally belonged, but there’s good reason that I kept it and that I keep it in such a prominent place. As a man in a traditionally masculine role with a fair amount of authority (both objectively because of my ordination and subjectively because of what people might project, rightly or wrongly, onto me because of the clerical collar or the deep voice or the slightly greying beard or whatever), I need to listen to and take seriously what I need to hear from those seen for whatever reason as less authoritative–laypeople, the young and the elderly, and especially women.

I share all of this to explain how important it is that Jesus, before he appeared to his chosen band, decided that the moment he miraculously overcame death went to Mary Magdalene and revealed himself to her first. There has been a great deal of ink spilled in the last few decades to explain that Mary Magdalene was neither the prostitute whom Jesus forgave in Luke 7 nor the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet in John 12, that this is all an invention of Pope Gregory I in the late sixth century. I don’t know whether or not Mary Magdalene was the remarkably inappropriately behaved woman of those stories or not (neither can be proved from scripture) but I’m more than a little curious about why so many have spent so much time distancing the woman who was the apostle to the apostles had to be recast as something other than a sinner who needed saving or an innapropriately emotional woman whose excesses Jesus needed to justify to Judas. Maybe Mary Magdalene was neither the “sinful woman” nor the overly emotional woman who wiped our Lord’s feet with her tears and hair (that remains an open question) but the insistence that she could not have been either of these women strikes me as a “solution looking for a problem.”

I guess I like to think that the woman depicted in my icon lecturing the apostles loved Jesus so much because her sins were so great, because my own sins are great, and she didn’t have the benefit of being able to hide from them to the same degree that those eleven guys did, that I do. Because the news of Our Lord rising from the dead didn’t need to be glossed as far as she would have been concerned. Somebody whom she loved more than anything, because he loved her in spite of everything, was alive. There was no need for figuring out the metaphysics of it; she was ready to see him, and so she did.

So, going back to how I have a y-chromosome and all that accompanies that and I have an indelible indentation in my skull from where my bishop laid his hands on me more than a decade-and-a-half-ago, I want to see Jesus just like somebody who needs a lot more grace than I think I do can see him. And I want to be just as excited to tell others how he changed my life. I want people with all the privilege I have to be able to see in the same way that the Magdalene saw how the Resurrection means everything!

I’ll not belabor the point, because we have a brunch and an egg hunt and all sorts of obligations for those attending neither (I know), but there’s nothing in the world more important than the fact that Christ Jesus was dead as a door-nail and then he was alive again, not in some metaphorical sense, but literally. If that weren’t an honest-to-God fact you all might as well be on the golf course this morning, and I might as well be teaching high school Latin (that used to be my favorite threat before most high school Latin classes went the way of all things, so help me think of a new one…). Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and for ever lives. It doesn’t matter if you’re an “unruly woman” like Mary Magdalene or a rather boring middle-aged dude. It doesn’t matter if you’re a pillar of the community or a nobody. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or something else, or rich or poor or something in between, or straight or gay or something in between, or conservative or liberal or something in between, or convinced or questioning or something in between. None of that really matters in the final analysis. The only thing that really matters is that Jesus Christ was dead and now he is alive. And he would come to us, as he came to the Magdalene, if only our love were so sincere. May God give us that love, over which even the gates of hell cannot prevail.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

As much as I grumble sometimes about contemporary trends in churches there is one which I fully endorse and am encouraged to have seen in recent years. Since the beginning of Church (and you can read all about it in Paul’s Epistles) there has been an uncomfortable dilemma regarding the degree to which Jewish practices have been adopted by gentile Christians. Long story short, it is not only unnecessary but in some cases positively harmful to do so. Yes, Jesus was a faithful Jew, and yes, the Old Covenant was given by the God of Israel who does not abandon his people, but the New Covenant established by Christ’s blood shed for us enjoins on the Church a new set of practices not based on fulfilling the works of the Law. To act as if this weren’t the case leads us down a dangerous path in a number of ways, and particularly with regard to our need to accept the gift of Grace through faith in Christ Jesus.

One particularly peculiar example of this has been the practice in some church communities of holding Passover Seders on Maundy Thursday, under the belief that this was what Jesus and his disciples were doing the night of the Last Supper. In recent years, bishops and theologians have been more vocal in saying “do not do this”, and I heartily approve of their doing so.

For one thing, it is an example of “cultural appropriation” which I realize is a transgression whose enforcement has sometimes gone over the top. A potentially silly example: every time I’ve been to Circle of Friends, the owner or one of her staff has offered to take a picture of our dining party wearing hats from cultures not our own. I don’t think there would be anything objectively wrong in doing so, particularly since the restaurant staff represent those cultures, but not in a million years would I take the chance of such a photo being put online and getting “canceled” over it. The internet is not a place where grace abounds, if you haven’t noticed.

On the other hand, there are boundaries one shouldn’t cross, even with good intentions. I think so-called Christian Seders is an example of this. When asked “why?” the example I always give is the same: How would you feel if the mosque in Perrysburg decided to put on a celebration of the Eucharist? Maybe it wouldn’t bother you, but I for one would find it pretty offensive. Or what if the Toledo chapter of the American Humanist Association started inducting its members by baptizing them in the name of reason and of materialism and of a responsible search for meaning? Now, just as we recognize Jesus was Jewish, a Muslim or a secular humanist might rightly claim (though they’d be loathe to do so) that their worldviews are products of a broader Western tradition defined by the form Christendom took when they were first envisioned, but should this give them a right to reenact a sacred ritual of another religion, whether as a mockery or as a sincere “re-appropriation”? Personally, I don’t think so.

So, by all means, if you ever have Jewish friends who invite you to their Passover Seder, you should go. I’ve been to them several times when I lived in more religiously diverse communities, and they can be wonderful, moving experiences. But we shouldn’t be putting them on.

An even larger issue for me, though, is that a “Christian Seder” makes an assumption which is almost certainly false–namely, that the meal which Jesus and the Apostles shared was a Passover Seder of the sort still practiced by modern Jews, with set prayers and various dishes and glasses of wine representing elements of Israel’s story, and some form of teaching around all of these elements. This, however, is a product of the form Judaism took after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70, nearly forty years after the Last Supper.

Jesus and the Apostles, on the other hand, would have shared a meal much closer to that which we heard about in tonight’s lesson from Exodus. They would have taken the lamb they had sacrificed at the temple earlier in the day, roasted it, and ate it quickly with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. No great ceremony would have attended the meal, and that intentionally, because it was a reminder of the simple sustenance God had given their ancestors on their last night in Egypt. This is why we share such a simple supper on this night between the liturgy and the stripping of the altar–it is meant to give us sustenance (both physically and spiritually) before observing our own Passover, which is the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross for our redemption.

Of course, there is one element which Christ adds to the Passover supper which he and his Apostles had shared–namely the offering of his own body and blood, by which we still, as St. Paul tells us, “shew the Lord’s death till he come.” The most awesome and humbling privilege I have as a priest, what I’ll never deserve to do but thank God I’ve been covered by his Grace, is speaking the words of Jesus “this is my body… this is my blood”, by which the same Grace of God makes real for us every time. The greatest gift I’ve been given as a priest in Christ’s Church is the terrible responsibility of acting in persona Christi for those few moments at every Eucharist. And the greatest gift we all have as Christians this side of Paradise, is to be given that which objectively, spiritually sustains us in all the seasons of our lives, both when things are going well for us and when we feel as if we might be on the cusp of or in the midst of wandering through the spiritual desert just as the Israelites did through a literal one.

As I always make certain to repeat, this is an objective reality, because if left to the subjective appropriation by us sinners it wouldn’t get us very far.

But there is also a sense in which we do benefit subjectively by this objective gift of Grace–it is to the degree that we recognize our own belovedness to God in spite of everything that we are given enough strength to extend that grace by loving others in spite of everything. This is why it is so appropriate that we also observe the mandatum, the washing of feet, as a symbol of the same this night. For years (probably since we reintroduced the practice about fifty years ago) there have been concerns about the message sent by the priest doing the foot-washing rather than everyone washing the feet of whoever is behind him or her in line. I won’t get into all of the arguments about that except to say that sometimes those most concerned with symbols which might imply clericalism are, ironically, often in practice the most authoritarian clergy you’ll ever meet. I think there are reasons for that, but I’ll just leave it at that for now. I think the way we do it, though, is most appropriate simply because there’s no way during Holy Week that a priest is spared “doing all the things” (as our bishop likes to say), but for the rest of you, even acknowledging that so many of you also do so much pertaining to observing Holy Week in the church, also need opportunities to simply abide in Christ’s love. Perhaps this is a dangerous or heretical suggestion, so take it with a grain of salt, but maybe insofar as it is possible, consider the practical application of the Gospel (how to better love my neighbor) on Monday morning. I don’t mean to be more unloving and selfish, obviously, but don’t get all caught up in the “shoulds” right now, which sometimes lead us to trust in our own works, anyway, that being a natural but deadly impulse. For the next three days simply remember that Jesus loves you. He loves you enough to die for you. Let him serve you. Let him show his love for you as we contemplate the Paschal mystery. Let him wash your feet. Let him nourish you with the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation. And tomorrow, remember, that as much as you might want to, you can’t save him. You can’t pull him off the cross and take his place yourself. That’s not how any of this works. Simply gaze on the glory which is the cross of life, on the God who dies, and wait for what comes next.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.